


After Bastogne

by perdiccas



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Foxholes, Grief/Mourning, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Shell Shock, World War II, Yuletide 2011, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perdiccas/pseuds/perdiccas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don’t fall back. Dig in deeper. Above all else, hold the line.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Bastogne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vulpesvortex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulpesvortex/gifts).



> A quick treat for vulpesvortex for Yuletide 2011.
> 
> With thanks to my beta & everyone who helped me get this posted. ♥

The trees have been reduced to splinters, confetti scattered on the ground. The line is hushed, a dance floor after New Year’s Eve, festooned with red and bile and every hue the human body spews when ripped apart, turned inside out. Shrapnel shines like silver garlands. Shards of bone glisten like pearl.

Easy have taken the shellacking of their lives but their orders stand: Don’t fall back. Dig in deeper. Above all else, hold the line.

Lipton does his duty. He levels and deepens the shallow ditch he’d shared with Luz. He digs it out wide enough for two, though Luz is huddled with Malarkey now. They’re both on Lipton’s orders not to let Buck Compton wander off alone.

In the quiet, the branches that fortify his foxhole rattle when someone approaches. He steels himself for Doc Roe, and one more report of death and dying, only to get Lieutenant Speirs of Dog instead. He slides into Lipton’s foxhole with quick, economical movements.

“Sir?” Lipton puts his entrenching tool aside while Speirs stamps the loose soil that remains into the frozen ground beneath them. Lipton nods his thanks. He listens as Speirs relays what he needs to know.

Speirs sits on his haunches facing Lipton. The heels of his jump-boots settle where the dud shell landed. It’s gone now. Luz had flung it back towards the krauts with the point of his entrenching tool, and a dozen cuss words besides. But in the white smoke of Speirs’s breath, Lipton sees the way the shell fizzled before it died.

He blinks hard.

Lipton tucks his frozen hands under his arms, but when he ducks his head to better focus on the lieutenant’s words, his gaze falls to the same patch of ice-hard dirt again. Half a yard away, Muck and Penkala are smeared across the earth in pieces too small to reclaim. His ears ring with the phantom sound of mortar rounds that no longer fall.

He shakes his head, coming back to himself to be greeted with silence. It’s hard to tell how much time has passed with neither of them speaking. Lipton replays Speirs’s words in his mind; as cotton-headed as he feels right now, there’s a part of him he can’t turn off that’s always alert and listening. “Yes, sir,” he says belatedly. “Thank you, sir,” he adds. Dog didn’t have to check in with Easy, not out here on the front when it would be easier, safer to reach Capt. Winters at Battalion HQ but Lipton appreciates the gesture all the same. He knows the men will too.

He glances up at the lieutenant, expecting him to take his leave, but Speirs is studying him from under the brim of his helmet with a cool, inscrutable stare.

Lipton shivers; it’s as much the muscle memory of bracing himself on shaking ground as it is the cold. He hunkers down. His shoulders tense. The whole of Easy knows what kind of pep talk Lieutenant Speirs is prone to give. His words can grind a man down more when what he needs most is to be lifted up. Lipton closes his eyes, and thinks instead of the way Luz will laugh when he gets back. He’ll wrap his voice around Speirs’s inflection in an impression that will turn his dirge into a joke.

Lipton’s not sure he has any laughter left in him. Later, maybe, he’ll remember how.

Speirs doesn’t grace him with any pearls of wisdom as he shifts wordlessly to sit beside him. His hand, though, is heavy on Lipton’s shoulder. His grip is comfortingly tight. It’s force of habit that prompts Lipton to offer him a corner of the blanket wrapped around his knees. He’s too numb to be surprised when Speirs accepts.

The foxhole is narrow. Under the blanket, their thighs are pressed together. Lipton huffs on his hands, flexing his fingers before they have the chance to freeze in place anymore than they already have. Speirs adjusts his hold on him, rubbing at the knots in his shoulder, brushing across the back of his neck. He ends with his arm flung over Lipton’s shoulders and his fingers curled around his upper arm. It’s a companionable embrace, one that Lipton has often offered to the other men, but rarely needed in return.

Speirs seems to know he needs it now.

Speirs moves in careful but uncompromising motions. Lipton lets himself be nudged into position, shuffled around until Speirs's back is pressed against the wall of frozen earth and he's cradled snugly to Speirs's chest, insulated bodily from the cold. And it’s only now, when he's wedged in place with Speirs’s arms criss-crossed around his chest that he realises quite how violently he’s shivering. Lipton clutches at Speirs’s arms, willing himself to be still.

Speirs’s breath is wet and hot on the back of his neck, an unexpected intimacy when Lipton leans back into his warmth and Speirs's mouth glances against his skin. He rubs his hands briskly over Lipton’s arms to warm him up, and up and down his chest. He bends his knees, bracketing them on either side of Lipton’s body to hold him steady. Speirs pins him tight when Lipton feels as if he’s about to shake apart.

He reaches lower, his hands running firmly over the tops of Lipton’s thighs. He strokes down as far as he can reach, and up again along the inseam of Lipton’s pants. His fingers brush Lipton’s groin in passing, and then return more certainly when Lipton inhales sharply but doesn’t flinch.

Speirs opens Lipton’s fly only as low as he needs to ease his hand inside. He’s careful not to let the biting wind in with it, something for which Lipton is profoundly grateful; his penis is soft, small with the cold and the lingering edge of terror. When Speirs gropes him gently, his breath catches in his chest. He squirms in Speirs’s arms, ashamed, not of being touched, but of being found wanting, in this, too.

Speirs pauses when Lipton hesitates. It’s a consideration Lipton doesn’t expect, not from a man with a reputation like the one the lieutenant shoulders. He hums an enquiring noise in Lipton’s ear. His hand still hovers in Lipton’s underwear but without touching, seemingly ready to withdraw. Before he can pull away, Lipton finds the strength to roll his hips. He pushes upward into Speirs’s palm.

Once he does, it’s only half the effort to do it again, and then again, because now Speirs’s hand moves to meet him. Lipton pants heavily through his nose, careful even in this to be quiet so the krauts don't overhear. He twists his hips, thrusts in frantic, needy pulses. His heart hammers in his chest. If they’re all dead already, how can it matter if Lipton’s too eager or if Speirs’s lips graze his jaw?

But Lipton doesn’t believe that. Whatever Speirs might say, his hand is warm and he’s teasing Lipton’s body more alive than anything else in these godforsaken woods.

“That’s it,” Speirs murmurs, his voice low and rough. “It’s okay.”

Lipton arches against him. He lets the feeling overtake him until he’s spent.

Even as Lipton’s breathing slows, Speirs holds him. It’s only when he's pulled himself together enough to manage sitting up that Speirs pulls his hand from where it’s tucked between Lipton’s legs. He rubs his soiled hand in the dirt, brushing the grit off absently on his pants. His arousal presses against Lipton’s hip but he makes no move to tend to it. When Lipton turns towards him, unsure, Speirs shifts away.

“Alright now?” he asks. If not for the flush on his cheeks, Lipton would have guessed him unaffected.

Lipton ducks his head. “Alright, sir,” he confirms, surprised by the truthfulness of his words.

Speirs squeezes his shoulder again and nods once. He crouches up to peer over the edge of the foxhole. “I’d better get back to Dog.”


End file.
